Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto is a very interesting and thoughtful collection of essays about what books are, their design and production, their publication, how they get to us, what makes them valuable, and their future. I cannot begin to describe all the varied new information and perspectives these essays contain.

If you are at all interested in the future of publishing and the future of books, you will want to read Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto.

The essays describe the engineering and the semantic markup language that permits storing of chunks of information for digital publication of ebooks in multiple forms including words in multiple languages, pictures, sounds, and even motion. That’s the easy part.

The authors are people who worked in, thought about, and experimented with the creation, distribution, and use of digital information including the interactions that digital information makes possible.

Each essay ends with links to give its author feedback or to add your comments. The creation of this book through to the feedback is itself an experiment.

Throughout the book there are links to references available on the internet.

The first essay, Context, Not Container defines these links as part of the important context information that should be included with the text, but is excluded or at least separated from the text in regular books.

I highly recommend that you buy the ebook version of Book: The Futurist’s Manifesto because the links give you quick access to the information you want from the internet. I give the ebook version 5 stars

The printed book is in black and white. It contains some graphs with a narrative that refers to the lines by their color. But, I believe it deserves four stars because it tells you how you can read Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto for free in color on the internet.

I received a review book copy from O’Reilly. I started reading the book, and then read some of the book including the graphic parts online. Then I bought an ebook for myself and loved it because the ebook looked so good, and the links worked so well. I will donate the print book for our November user group raffle. Print books are great for gifts.